Creative Solutions to San Francisco’s Housing Crisis

At a time when the median two-bedroom apartment rent, $3,550, now consumes about half the average resident’s wages, most news coverage in San Francisco has made the crisis in housing affordability sound insurmountable.

For the summer print edition, we scouted for creative new ideas for big-effect, cost-effective and politically feasible solutions.

Our focus was on bold — if not necessarily imminent — concepts that could keep rents down while preserving the city’s diverse communities and cultures. (See below: What makes a good housing “solution”?)

In June, we went to the community for more ideas, convening a daylong workshop at the Impact Hub San Francisco called “Hack the Housing Crisis.” Policymakers, builders, neighborhood activists, architects, technologists, artists and other longtime San Franciscans presented more than 20 of their own solutions. The event was co-sponsored by Shareable, with help from Craigconnects and other sponsors.

We felt we needed to provide more than another expose about a troubled institution or failed public policy. It is a risky proposition for a publication that embraces neutrality to specifically seek out and highlight ideas for solutions not yet on the Board of Supervisors’ weekly agenda. But readers told us repeatedly that they wanted to learn about new policy ideas that could improve their community.

FEASIBLE: conceivable in terms of cost, politics and legal constraints

EFFECTIVE: adds or preserves hundreds or thousands of affordable units

SIMPLE: easy to implement without a multitude of policy steps

CONTEXTUAL: has precedent in other cities or in SF’s past

DATA-DRIVEN: backed up by research, prototypes and documentation

We are doing this because readers have told us over and over that they want to hear more about ways they can help solve problems, not just read about what went wrong with a trusted institution. We look to the example set by the Solutions Journalism Network, as well as Journalism That Matters, for inspiration for how to do solutions-focused journalism that, while it endeavors to be independent and not cross over into advocacy, is still controversial in many newsrooms because it invites the community to help set the news agenda.

San francisco housing by the numbers

$3,550 median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the S.F metro area in June

13.8 percentage increase in average rent for a two-bedroom apartment over one year

2½ number of times faster that San Francisco rents increased vs. national average

48 percentage of average wages required to rent a two-bedroom apartment

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